#Rambling About Things That I Can't Write In My Worship Journal But Still Want To Work Through It Via Writing blog.

[nehts]

HM.

[niccage]

God okay so I've been on my Teddy Roosevelt bullshit lately - why? we'll never know - and anyways Death CW, Death in Childbirth CW, and overall just Depressing Teddy Roosevelt Rambling Warning for beneath the readmore but yeah I gotta talk for a second about this bc I can't stop thinking about it

Alright so real talk I've been digging into Roosevelt's journal entries/writings from his time in North Dakota recently and I knew some about why he'd returned in 1884 (to grieve his wife, Alice, who died in childbirth, and his mother, Martha, who had both passed within 24 hours of each other in February of that year) but oh my god... it just gets so much more depressing the more I read.

So I knew that Alice and Martha had both died on St. Valentine's Day, but I hadn't realized that it was the four-year-anniversary of Teddy and Alice's engagement announcement (I say announcement specifically because it took eight months for Alice to finally accept Teddy's marriage proposal.) Teddy self-proclaimed that he'd never had any childhood sweethearts or boyhood crushes, nothing even close to a love affair before he met Alice in 1878, and while I'm not entirely sure I believe him about that, still, when you read the surviving journal entries about her, it's hard to not be convinced. He's just utterly smitten with her, almost enchanted, by the way he writes. "My darling Little Sunshine," "my laughing love," "my sunny faced darling," "a star of heaven," "my little witch of a sweetheart," and a personal favorite, written after a "long and beautiful" walk in Oyster Bay:

"How I love her! and I would trust her to the end of the world. Whatever troubles come upon me - losses or griefs or sickness - I know she will only be more true and loving and tender than ever; she is so radiantly pure and good and beautiful that I almost feel like worshipping her. Not one thing is ever hidden between us. No matter how long I live I know my love for her will only grow deeper and tenderer day by day; and she shall always be mistress over all that I have."

And it's just so clear from the way he talks about her, always, that this rich, goofy, chatterbox of a city boy is just so in love, and he's so young (his twenties!!!) but he talks about wanting to spend the rest of his long life with her, and he even says that he wants their daughter to be born on February 14th, 1884 because it'll be the four-year-anniversary of their engagement.

But then, his journal entry for February 14th, 1884 is just a giant black X, and then beneath it: "The light has gone out of my life."

After Alice dies, Teddy essentially never talks about her again. Not even to their daughter who shares her name (though he'd call her Baby Lee instead of Alice, presumably to not be reminded of her mother.) He rips up most of his journal entries about her, and burns all of their letters. He's twenty-five, and a single father, and a widow, and he's just so utterly devastated, and he's trying to throw himself back into his work but he's starting fights in the courtrooms and he can't sleep at night, and finally, it's like the only thing he can think to do is hightail it the fuck out of New York and return to the Badlands, a region he'd fallen in love with during an initial trip in 1883, and start cattle ranching, full force, full speed, as though he's been doing it all his life.

On February 17th, 1884, Teddy writes, in reference to Alice's death: "For joy or for sorrow, my life has now been lived out.” And Teddy's really not kidding when he says this: he is so eager, even more than he was during his first trip in 1883, to take on this new "real cowboy" identity that he just never, ever looks back to this "first life" of his, and yet, when you parse through all of the hunting logs and general surveys in his journals, you find some of the saddest, loneliest descriptions of the North Dakota landscape imaginable - some of the heavy-hitters:

“Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him.”

“Nothing could be more lonely, and nothing could be more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses.”

“I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination for me.”

“When one is in the Bad Lands, he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe's tales and poems sound.” *

*** Okay, just gotta say, the image of this young, emotionally-wrecked guy sitting alone in his small, dark cabin, mourning his young, dead wife while also thinking about Edgar Allen "Never Met A Young, Dead Wife I Wouldn't Write A Poem About" Poe... it's almost too much

Anyways, not to be weird about Teddy Roosevelt on main, but it's just like... the first time he went out to the Badlands in 1883, he was this sickly, bookish, snobby city politician, so desperate for Adventure and Romance and Possibility, bright-eyed and determined and so eager to just overcome his fucking asthma, and then, it's only a year later, and this young kid's a young widow, and he's handing his infant daughter off to his sister to run right back to this distant place that's nothing like the posh, privileged life he's always lived, and he throws himself into this new life as though he's trying his best to forget the last one, but for all the cattle-ranching and gunslinger-punching and cow-thief-stopping that he does, still, he's just so overwhelmed by this loneliness, this "melancholy monotony," and this grief he doesn't want to acknowledge... All these journal entries, and still, I just can't imagine what it was like for him in that empty log cabin for that first year. Poor kid.